If you have Direct at home, chances are you can to use your home receiver. If you travel far from home, you will have to contact Direct to change the local channel broadcast (and change it back again when you get home).

There may be some receivers that are not compatible with roof-mount dishes and I'm not up-to-date on what is currently out there.

Dome type dishes won't get specialty HD channels on Direct because they are on a satellite the dome cannot tune in, but the standard networks are all HD now anyways. Open face dishes can manage any of the Direct satellites. Both types are auto-seeking these days, so equally convenient.

There is no way in heck I would install any Winegard products. Their customer support it among the worst in the industry. I have had two Winegard Travlers and both failed prematurely. The second one is sitting on my trailers roof and all Winegard wants is for me to do is take it down, package it up and ship to them. 75 pounds round trip from the west coast is over 200 dollars plus whay ever they choose to gouge me for repair.

Mounting the antenna is not difficult if you have the space for it. You will also need to run the control cable inside the RV, and you will need to run a single coax into the RV to connect to your receiver. If your current receiver is not SWM compatible, get one that is.

Here is a pic of my roof installation. I have the old Slimline-5 that is converted to SWM by the use of the SWM-8 switch that is next to the base of the unit. I had an 18" single LNB antenna before I installed the Slimline-5 antenna, so I was able to use that coax to bring the signal inside the RV.

For years we had a Motosat dish that finally could not be repaired and they're out of business now so we needed to change.. Some of the old Motosat employees started RF Mogul which is in Salt Lake City. We now have an RF Mogul Eagle automatic roof-mounted dish for DirecTV HD channels. This dish is oval shaped and larger than the old ones and it has three LNBs. If you want high definition channels you have to have the correct dish because they use a different satellite than the standard definition channels. How it skews is important for the type of channels you want to access (e.g. standard or HD). Also, Dish and DirecTV use different satellites so you have to specify that you want one for DirecTV. Domes are more limited and don't do well with HD. The RF Mogul "box" is easy to use but has extra features programmed into it if needed. Jerry just turns on the box, presses the Search button, then opens a beer and relaxes until a program comes on a few minutes later. The box display shows how long it took to find the satellite and it's much faster than the old dishes.

An arm and a leg - but we sure do like it! I'm not being facetious. Neither of us remembers and we'd have to go look it up. But they're definitely more expensive than things like Winegard.

ArdraF

I seem to recall seeing the RF Mogul "Eagle" Dish version at an RV show priced at ~$2000.

A question for you, Ardra: Do you know if the RF Mogul Dish version can be manually "steered" to one or more of the Dish eastern arc satellites at 61.5 or 72.7? I know the default automatic setup and LNB are for the western arc sats at 110, 119, & 129.

I believe some DirecTV boxes will not work remotely, e.g. Genie Mini. That has to be “connected” the HD-DVR in a parent/child relationship.

I have a standard non-HD box that I take to Baja and hook to a dish I bought online, which probably would work in a MH too.

Would like to hear differing information from those here that have more experience using a box from home. I think DTV would rather have you open a separate account and wouldn’t be very helpful on this topic, which doesn’t sound like a great deal.

Mounting the antenna is not difficult if you have the space for it. You will also need to run the control cable inside the RV, and you will need to run a single coax into the RV to connect to your receiver. If your current receiver is not SWM compatible, get one that is.

We have an original (1992) winegard retractable antenna that works wonderful. Picks up local TV just fine. I use it to watch early morning news. We have a DVD player for movies. That's all the TV we want